“It was very important for us,” 72-year-old Daljinder Kaur told Barcroft Media following her son’s birth. “I can live happily now. My life is complete.”
Kaur and her 79-year-old husband, Mohinder Singh Gill who have been married for 47 years, have been trying to conceive for two years.
They regularly traveled six hours from their home in Amritsar, Punjab, to the National Fertility and Test Tube Baby Centre, where Kaur endured multiple rounds of in vitro fertilization, a procedure that manually combines an egg and sperm to create an embryo that is inserted back in the uterus.
“I first tried to avoid the case because she was very weak, but then her medical reports were normal and she was fit to conceive,” said Anurag Bishnoi, who runs the fertility clinic.
And Kaur and Gill are are not just beating the odds when it comes to having a child at their age: they also have both surpassed the average life expectancy in Punjab.
The average man there only lives to about 70 years old, while women usually live until 72, according to data from the Indian government. [myad]
